Digital and Analog

What does it mean to say we live in a digital age? Until the 20^th century, when computers, smartphones, and the internet began to dominate our lives, the world was analog. Speedometers, cassette tapes, rulers, film cameras, wristwatches, and all other technologies of the previous age are "analog" because they function through analogy. The plastic, silver-coated film in a camera, when exposed to light and developed in a photo lab, creates an analogy of the real-world scene you photographed. A vinyl LP record, when spun and read by a needle, plays an analogy of the song recorded. Digital technology, in contrast, requires converting information into numbers (0’s and 1’s) electronically for storage. A photo taken on a smartphone or a song downloaded from the internet is stored instantly digitally—as digits. It’s no wonder digital technology has overtaken analog—a smartphone can store thousands of jpeg photos and mp3 songs in less space than a single roll of analog film or an LP record. Digital files can be instantly sent across great distances, encrypted for security, and easily edited by changing the numbers that directly represent the image or song in question. Nevertheless, there’s something alluring about analog technology in our increasingly digital world.

I’m not quite of the generation the news media likes to call “digital natives.” I remember dancing around my grandmother’s basement listening to old records on the walnut AM/FM player that had been her first big purchase in America. Her wrinkled hands would gently place the black plastic disk onto the rubber plate and slowly lower the needle onto the record. With a hiss, the room would suddenly fill with the sound of a Flemish waltz or gypsy polka. I wrote with pencils sharpened to stubs in leather-bound journals as a child, took many photos with disposable film cameras purchased at pharmacies, and read through endless piles of paperback books checked out and proudly carried home from the local library. Growing up in the early 2000s, I experienced the world’s transition to digital firsthand. Our heavy cathode ray tube analog television that made your hair stand on end with static electricity if you touched the screen right after you turned it on went out the door when I was ten, replaced by a LED flat screen. My mom’s silver and black Pentax film camera was abandoned to the basement closet in favor of a new Canon digital point-and-shoot earlier than that. My dad bought a Wi-Fi router from AT&T and a Kindle e-reader for my sister, and suddenly we didn’t have to go to the library anymore or have a shelf for books.

When I started high school, the administrators decided to replace classroom chalkboards with Promethean brand digital smartboards and give students iPads to replace our books and notebooks. My world became one of colorful icons representing applications I could run by tapping my finger on the touchscreen panel. “Notes” depicted a yellow paper notepad, “mail” an envelope, “camera” a photo lens, “YouTube” an old-fashioned television set. I remember choosing games to play from a screen meant to look like the green felt and wood of a pool table. Apple eased us into the world of touchscreens through design that represented the analog world we were comfortable with—interface designers call this approach skeuomorphism. The company eased off as years went on. Before I graduated, my iPad received an update that converted icons, buttons, and backgrounds to bright solid colors. People were comfortable enough with touch-based smartphones, designers figured, they no longer needed their graphical user interfaces to closely resemble real-world objects. Still some elements of skeuomorphism remain—the “phone” icon that looks like an old receiver (not a black rectangle) or the “save” button with its image of the long-forgotten floppy disk.

Like everyone else my age, I’m now used to digital technology. I have a cellphone, a tablet, Bluetooth earbuds, a smartwatch, and an e-reader, not to mention a drawer full of disused electronics from years passed. Yet more and more recently, I’ve found myself drawn to the analog. After years of typing notes on the glass of an iPad screen, I bought a bullet journal to replace my “notes” app and online calendar. After some research, I purchased a fountain pen that's a joy to write with. I enjoy typing research papers much more with the spring-loaded click of the keys of my mechanical keyboard under my fingers, instead of the mushy squish of a membrane or cold glass of an iPad keyboard. I replaced the harsh blue fluorescent bulbs in my room with the soft orange glow of Edison bulbs. I dug my mom’s Pentax camera out of the closet for a black and white analog film photography college class. I’ve been listening to my grandmother’s records more and Spotify less. I own dozens of e-books on half a dozen different reading apps but prefer the smell of a good paperback pulled from my shelf. There’s something real, something tactile, sensual, intuitive about the analog, physical world that digital (so far) hasn’t managed to replicate. Our future, powered by artificial intelligence and virtual reality, promises to be more digital and less real than ever before. The challenge technology companies will face, these next decades, will be making the digital world more human--human enough, at least, that we humans can stand to live in it.